Topic: China

How to Deter China’s Industrial Espionage

Max Boot 05.23.2013 - 1:05 PM

It hasn’t gotten much attention, but this week the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property—a clumsy name for a valuable undertaking—issued its findings on the threat posed by espionage against American industry, mostly in the cyber domain, and suggested steps to mitigate them. The entire report of the commission, chaired by retired Admiral Dennis Blair and former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, is worth reading.

It certainly underlines the size of the problem, estimating that annual losses from intellectual property theft top $300 billion and result in the loss (or more properly the failure to add) millions of jobs to the U.S. economy. It also squarely blames China as the main source of all this theft, accounting for 50-80 percent of the whole. “National industrial policy goals in China encourage IP theft,” the commission found, “and an extraordinary number of Chinese in business and government entities are engaged in this practice.”

Leave a comment

Hollywood Plays “Let’s Make a Deal” with Chinese Communist Censors

Seth Mandel 05.07.2013 - 6:00 PM

In 2007, Cracked devoted one of its beloved lists to “The 7 Least-Faithful Comic Book Movies.” Given the proliferation of comic book adaptations to the big screen, and the famously high standards of the fans of each graphic novel, competition was no doubt fierce. The piece opens: “Look, Hollywood, we understand that film is a different medium than comic books. We realize that changes must be made, storylines streamlined, art design massaged.”

“But,” the author adds, “there are some films that we cannot forgive.” Indeed, high standards for authenticity are one thing, the understandable desire of fans to see a film that shares more than a title with its namesake is quite another. And so some artistic alterations in one version of the new Iron Man film are sure to raise eyebrows among viewers. Even more notable, however, is why those changes were made. The Washington Post reports:

Read More

5

Leave a comment

America is Forfeiting the Space Race

Michael Rubin 05.01.2013 - 4:15 PM

A former colleague brings to my attention two stories which should raise concern. President Obama talks about investment in science but, in practice, such investment gets siphoned off into entitlements or teachers unions, rather than research.

First, this, an article reporting that the Pentagon is using a Chinese satellite for its U.S. Africa Command:

Use of China’s Apstar-7 satellite was leased because it provided “unique bandwidth and geographic requirements” for “wider geographic coverage” requested in May 2012 by the U.S. Africa Command, according to Lieutenant Colonel Monica Matoush, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

3

Leave a comment

Iranian Flotilla to Head to China

Michael Rubin 02.27.2013 - 3:00 PM

It was inevitable that in an era when John Kerry is the secretary of state and the State Department basically runs the Pentagon, America’s adversaries would begin to test U.S. resolve. Hence, the latest news out of Iran should not surprise:

Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said Tuesday that Iranian flotilla of warships entered the Pacific Ocean after passing through the Malaga region, one of the most important waterways around the world. On the sidelines of a national ceremony, Sayyari told IRNA that the Iranian flotilla is to be berthed at a Chinese port with the objective of strengthening friendly relations between Tehran and Beijing.

6

Leave a comment

Start Retaliating for Chinese Cyber Attacks

Max Boot 02.20.2013 - 9:10 AM

The Chinese government is issuing ludicrously unconvincing denials of the report issued by the Internet security firm Mandiant that a specific unit of the People’s Liberation Army—Unit 61398 based in an office-building in Shanghai–is responsible for many of the worst cyber attacks on American companies and governmental agencies. “Chinese military forces have never supported any hacking activities,” a spokesman for the Chinese defense ministry said at a press briefing. “The claim by the Mandiant company that the Chinese military engages in Internet espionage has no foundation in fact.”

Uh right. And if you believe that then no doubt the spokesman also has some nice swampland near Shanghai to sell you.

4

Leave a comment

NYT Deserves Praise for China Reporting

Max Boot 01.31.2013 - 11:55 AM

As someone who regularly critiques New York Times articles, I feel it is only fair to also give credit where it’s due. The Times deserves kudos for publishing an expose on the vast wealth accumulated by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao and his relatives–an article that has resulted, the newspaper revealed this morning, in four months of sophisticated attacks on its computer network by Chinese hackers.

There is nothing at all surprising about the Chinese cyber-harassment in response to criticism. This has long been a trademark of the Beijing regime, which typically operates through hackers that provide a layer of deniability to Chinese officials. Indeed last year Bloomberg was similarly targeted after running an article revealing the riches accumulated by Xi Jinping, then China’s vice president at the time.

2

Leave a comment

Can Social Media Bring Free Speech to China?

Bethany Mandel 01.28.2013 - 4:00 PM

Despite the Chinese government’s best efforts to block the spread and influence of social media, it appears that its stranglehold on information is slipping, forcing the government to take steps toward reform. Earlier this month, the Twitter feed administered by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing began to report on the dangerously toxic air quality in the capital. The New York Times reported on the government’s efforts to shut it down:

The existence of the embassy’s machine and the @BeijingAir Twitter feed have been a diplomatic sore point for Chinese officials. In July 2009, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official, Wang Shu’ai, told American diplomats to halt the Twitter feed, saying that the data “is not only confusing but also insulting,” according to a State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks. Mr. Wang said the embassy’s data could lead to “social consequences.”

Leave a comment

The Virtues of Susan Rice’s “Undiplomatic” Diplomacy

Max Boot 12.13.2012 - 2:10 PM

I’m not quite sure why so many of my fellow conservatives have focused so much ire on Susan Rice’s potential nomination to be secretary of state. She would definitely not be my first choice for the job (that would be Joe Lieberman) but compared to some of the other rumored second-term nominations—e.g, Chuck Hagel at Defense or John Kerry at State—the possibility of Susan Rice doesn’t seem so bad. She actually seems to have a more activist vision of American power than many in the Democratic Party who are eager to cut the American role in the world back as rapidly as possible.

Much of the criticism directed at her for her blunt, undiplomatic personality sounds like a virtual replay of the criticisms once made of Jeane Kirkpatrick and John Bolton, both conservative favorites when they served as UN ambassador. Indeed Rice sounded positively Boltonesque (admittedly not something she would consider to be a compliment) when she recently told off the Chinese ambassador, Li Baodung, in a UN Security Council debate over how to respond to North Korea’s missile launch. According to Colum Lynch in Foreign Policy:

Read More

4

Leave a comment

Obama’s Partners Profit on Iran Sanctions Waivers

Michael Rubin 12.10.2012 - 8:30 AM

On Friday, President Obama issued a second round of waivers, in theory to give countries more time to disentangle themselves from their financial dealings in Iran. Reuters reported:

The United States granted 180-day waivers on Iran sanctions to China, India and a number of other countries on Friday in exchange for their cutting purchases of oil from the Islamic Republic. President Barack Obama’s administration has now renewed waivers for all 20 of Iran’s major oil buyers, after granting them to Japan and 10 European Union countries in September. Friday’s action was the second renewal for all 20 after Obama signed the sanctions into law a year ago.

Leave a comment

Obama Planning Major Foreign Policy Readjustment?

Seth Mandel 11.13.2012 - 2:00 PM

James Monroe had the Monroe Doctrine; Harry Truman had the Truman Doctrine; George W. Bush had the Bush Doctrine; and now, the L.A. Times reports, Barack Obama will have the Costanza Doctrine.

Or at least that’s the best way to understand it. In a season five episode of “Seinfeld,” George Costanza’s character decides his life has been marked by an almost uninterrupted parade of bad decisions, and he must now do the opposite to break the pattern. The L.A. Times tries delicately to couch the Obama administration’s second-term foreign policy agenda in terms of moderation and pragmatism, but voters may, if the report is correct, witness an agenda quite different in tone and substance from what Obama told them he would do if reelected:

Read More

6

Leave a comment

Corruption in China Isn’t Just a Local Story

Max Boot 10.29.2012 - 3:10 PM

Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, must have felt like he was hit by a political hurricane last week when the New York Times published a front-page story claiming that he and his family control a fortune of at least $2.7 billion.

While it has been generally known that the Communist Party elite were acquiring considerable wealth, that is still an eye-popping amount. All the more so because it is hardly an aberration. As my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Elizabeth Economy notes in a trenchant blog post on the Wen scandal, “the annual 2011 Hurun report on the wealthiest Chinese reveals that the top seventy members of the National People’s Congress are worth a combined total of $89.8 billion; in contrast, the net worth of the top 660 U.S. officials is only $7.5 billion.”

3

Leave a comment

Don’t Just Worry About Iranian Influence in Iraq

Michael Rubin 10.19.2012 - 2:25 PM

Within the United States, conventional wisdom relates that Iraq is now a puppet of Iran. There is real reason for concern, and I won’t be one that will downplay Iranian attempts to influence, if not dominate, Iraq. That said, Iraqi Shi’ites are traditionally not pro-Iranian; they are pro-Iraqi. After all, during the Iran-Iraq War, the bulk of Iraqi conscripts on the front line hailed not from Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit and its Sunni environs, but rather from Baghdad and the largely Shi’ite towns and villages of Iraq’s south. They fought against the Shi’ite brethren because they saw themselves as Iraqis and Arabs first, not Persians.

That said, Iranian influence is on the increase. Iran’s true Achilles’ heel is Shi’ism. Because the supreme leader claims to be the deputy of the Messiah on earth, with ultimate political and religious authority, the theologically independent ayatollahs in Najaf, Iraq, undercut his authority whenever they contradict him. Iran will never tolerate the rise of an ayatollah to the political leadership in Iraq because that would pose a threat to the supreme leader. However, the Iranians will try to dominate Iraq to ensure that Iranian strategic interests remain paramount. Certainly, it need not have been this way: Had the United States retained a presence in Iraq, even if a limited number of forces simply kicked their heels in isolated bases, their presence would have enabled Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to better resist Iranian demands. For many Middle Eastern countries, diplomacy is about balance. Iran will ratchet up its pressure and perhaps its presence in Iraq as its grasp on Syria falters. Iraqis worry openly that they will become Iran’s new frontline.

Leave a comment

Media Building False Narratives on Top of Already Debunked Ones

Seth Mandel 09.12.2012 - 5:25 PM

Today’s furious attack on Mitt Romney by the media—epitomized by reporters’ embarrassing behavior at a morning press conference—presented a perfect example of the media’s proud perpetuation of their own false narratives. These narratives don’t just win or lose the news cycle in which they are invented, but reappear later on as building blocks to the newest such narrative.

Today’s piece on the complaints about Romney’s statements on the embassy attacks over at Buzzfeed is a great illustration of this. Ben Smith writes (emphasis mine):

Read More

4

Leave a comment

Will Enemy Drones Cause the Next 9/11?

Michael Rubin 09.11.2012 - 8:20 AM

American counterterrorism strategy is too often geared to preventing the last terrorist attack. Terrorists and their sponsors are creative, however. They will not pursue a strategy against which they know the United States is well prepared to defend itself but will instead look to maintain surprise. Eleven years ago, it was using airplanes for suicide attacks. In intervening years, it has been using liquid to construct explosives in flight, or concealing bombs in underwear. Counterterror specialists already worry about the possibility that Al Qaeda doctors could surgically implant bombs in terrorists. Other specialists worry that ship-borne cargo could harbor nuclear or chemical weapons.

The United States is not preparing, however, for a new threat which is, literally, over-the-horizon. Drones have become the counterterror tool of choice for the Obama administration, with devastating effect. But the days when the United States monopolizes drones have already come to an end. China and Russia have built drones, and Pakistan is exploring the technology. Using technology provided by the Obama administration, Turkey is building its own drones and preparing to sell them without regard to U.S. national security interests. After all, Turkey’s prime minister even considers Hamas a viable partner. Iran already has constructed and put into operation a robust drone fleet, perhaps enhanced with technology derived from the U.S. drone lost over its territory. Iran is helping Venezuela build its own drones. While the nightmare scenario for the counterterror community is Iran or other states providing terror groups with unconventional weapons, the likelihood that they might provide drones is greater.

5

Leave a comment

Clinton’s Task in China Just Got Tougher

Max Boot 09.04.2012 - 1:20 PM

Good luck to Hillary Clinton on her visit to Beijing to try to cajole the Chinese leadership into settling through negotiations their disputes with the Philippines, Japan, and other nations over potentially mineral-rich islands in the South China Sea and East China Sea. She will need it, because the Chinese leadership has no interest in amicably resolving these disputes, because then it would lose a grievance it can exploit to fan nationalist sentiment. And why is the Chinese leadership so interested in building up nationalist resentment? The answer is not hard to find—see for example the latest article on the hijinks of a Communist princeling.

This one concerns a car crash that occurred earlier this year in Beijing—the driver of a Ferrari was killed and two women who were traveling with him were badly injured. All three were apparently in various states of undress. Turns out the fabulously rich driver was the son of Ling Jihua, former head of the General Office of the Communist Party Central Committee and a close ally of outgoing president Hu Jintao. The news of the crash only leaked out, it appears, because he had fallen from official favor, being demoted to a less powerful position.

Leave a comment

China’s Arms Exports Aren’t Mistakes

Ted R. Bromund 08.28.2012 - 11:05 AM

Colum Lynch had an interesting feature on China’s arms exports to sub-Saharan Africa in the Washington Post this weekend. His premise was that, while China does all it can to prevent this trade from becoming public knowledge, it is conducted without the approval of China’s diplomats. This may in some cases be true: the Chinese Foreign Ministry may not know about China’s exports of incendiary cartridges. But that just sums up the problem, which is that China is not a nation governed by law. Expecting it to have regular, lawful processes is quite beside the point.

Lynch quotes one expert as arguing that China’s arms trade is “a case of unbridled capitalism.” This is ridiculous: the Chinese exporters may be making profits, but they are state-owned. They are doing what they are supposed to do, which is to win raw materials contracts and political influence for China by selling arms to governments under UN sanctions at prices few others can match. Chinese diplomats may find this embarrassing, but they do what they are told to do, which is to defend the sales and obstruct investigations. Westerners appear to be congenitally incapable of realizing that most autocracies, unlike Western democracies, have a public and a private face: the public face is on display at the UN, while the private one makes the decisions that actually matter.

2

Leave a comment

Pacific Allies Look to U.S. on China Disputes

Max Boot 08.20.2012 - 11:00 AM

Anti-Japanese demonstrations have broken out in China, again, because of the dispute over sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, which are claimed by both China and Japan. This is only one of many territorial disputes that China has with its neighbors over various tiny islands. China is deliberately fanning the flames of nationalism in order, one suspects, to distract attention from a slowing economy and an illegitimate leadership whose foibles are on display in the sordid Bo Xilai affair (the senior Communist Party official whose wife has just received a suspended death sentence for the murder of a British associate).

China’s neighbors are outraged and scared and looking to the U.S. for protection. The U.S. response, alas, has been spineless. This is a point that I and other commentators have made repeatedly but now it is seconded from an unexpected quarter–see this op-ed by Democratic Senator Jim Webb in today’s Wall Street Journal. He quite carefully never mentions President Obama and his administration, preferring to speak of the U.S. government and the State Department, but his article is a devastating indictment of the president’s supineness in the face of growing Chinese aggression.

Leave a comment

The Failure of “Quiet Diplomacy” in China

Seth Mandel 06.25.2012 - 1:45 PM

When Chinese anti-forced-abortion activist and dissident Chen Guangcheng attempted to use Hillary Clinton’s visit to China earlier this year to get his family to safety abroad, his efforts and those of the State Department appeared to have failed just hours before a deal was struck to save Chen. The narrative of that story held that a Republican House committee chaired by Chris Smith–which called a hearing on the case as it was developing–and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney had behaved recklessly in drawing such public attention to the case and appearing to hand down judgment on the case before diplomacy had a chance to work.

Typical of this attitude was a comment from Chinese politics expert Steve Tsang to the U.K. Guardian, as the story unfolded: “Public diplomacy or grandstanding will limit the scope for quiet diplomacy.” We have plenty of counterexamples in recent history that challenge this theory, but it appears now we don’t need to employ them. The full picture of Chen’s case comes to us in Susan Glasser’s Foreign Policy magazine cover profile of Clinton, at the very beginning and very end of the piece (everything in between is gauzy admiration terminally wounded by the article’s repeated and gauche comparison of Clinton to Aung San Suu Kyi).

Leave a comment

Will Treaty Force U.S. to Abandon Taiwan?

Michael Rubin 06.08.2012 - 4:15 PM

President Obama has pinned the United Nations front and center to his administration’s philosophy of foreign policy. Prior to engaging militarily in Libya, Obama sought Turtle Bay’s endorsement, but never bothered to seek that of the U.S. Congress. With his first—and possibly—last term winding down, the Obama team is rushing headlong into a number of UN-sponsored treaties absent much regard to American sovereignty and U.S. national security interests.

The latest case in point could be the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Ted Bromund, my former graduate school colleague and now a Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, and his Heritage colleague Dean Cheng have an important report out looking at how joining the ATT could jeopardize the U.S. ability to help Taiwan defend itself from an increasingly aggressive China.

While China calls Taiwan a renegade province, the fact of the matter is that Taiwan was only under mainland Chinese control during the Qing Dynasty, and even then the Chinese control was tenuous. Taiwan has its own identity—apparent to anyone who travels there–and, unlike China, enjoys democracy and basic individual liberty.

The United States, of course, like much of the world, recognized the Republic of China as the legitimate representative of China until Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with the Peoples’ Republic of China. While the United States and Taiwan no longer maintain formal embassies in each others’ capitals, both house institutes and organizations which act as de facto embassies. Officially, the United States remains committed to Taiwan’s security, although the number of U.S. cabinet-level visits has declined precipitously in recent years, a fault which can be laid at the hands not only of the Obama administration, but the George W. Bush administration as well.

3

Leave a comment

Is China Testing Weaponry in Afghanistan?

Michael Rubin 06.08.2012 - 11:25 AM

The General Accountability Office has released a report accusing Pakistan of blocking efforts to curb the smuggling of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) into Afghanistan:

IEDs are the top killer of U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan, according the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization. JIEDDO estimates that 83 percent of IEDs used in attacks on U.S. troops are made with fertilizers produced in Pakistan. IED attacks have increased slightly over the 12 months ending April 30, the most recent data available. There were 16,165 IED incidents over that period, a 2 percent increase.

Leave a comment

Are you a subscriber?

Subscriber Log In
Subscriber Services